Newsweek's Contribution to the Secular Jihad

Not surprisingly, Newsweek's managing editor wrote a lengthy piece about the Nativity and not surprisingly he's concluded that it's silly to believe. [yawn] This is par for the course for the news-show-biz, which has, for at least the last 24 years, been peddling the idea that their brand of visceral secularist-leftism is the only rational alternative to snake-handling. I take issue with the very idea that secularist-leftism is rational. The idea that it is the only intellectual real-estate other than religious fanaticism is in itself laughable.

Hugh Hewitt took notice of this tract and has posed the following:

...read the Meacham piece and the Mohler-Roberts responses. Then write on the subject of what these articles tell us about the MSM's abilities and credibility on matters of faith and history, specifically, is the Newsweek article the religion reporting equivalent of Rathergate? What accounts for the appearance in a major news magazine of such a biased piece?

What does the article tell us about the news-show-biz's abilities and credibility of faith and history?

The piece itself is a typical recitation of the left's prejudices and their stereotypes of believing Christians. The author presents his "enlightened" view of Christianity and goes to great length to quote the full spectrum of left through far-left historians on the topic. As I said, there is nothing new here. By presenting only his personal view and the views of those who concur, the author has presented a classic piece of non-journalism. For the same reason this is not scholarship. Rather it is yet another in a several decades-long tradition of leftist self-promotion and reflexive condescension toward anyone who might disagree.

Like the Victorians, we live in an age of great belief and great doubt, and sometimes it seems as though we must choose between two extremes, the evangelical and the secular. "I don't want to be too simplistic, but our faith is somewhat childlike,"

Whoa, thank God we have the adults at Newsweek to steer us right! Here we have it again. There is nothing in Meacham's world between secularism and what he terms "evangelism". Take just about any news-show-biz story which touches on religion from the last quarter of a century and this is exactly the false dilemma they offer. Mindlessness like this is why I stopped being a consumer of TV news.

Dr. Albert Mohler's response is excellent. Read the whole thing.

In particular I would like to address two paragraphs near the end. Firstly:

Jon Meacham is the classic self-congratulatory theological liberal. He identifies himself as a devoted and believing Episcopalian, even as he assails the historical trustworthiness of the Bible and suggests that much of the faith he claims to believe is simply the product of literary invention and theological construction.

That pretty much sums it up. As I maintain, Meacham's piece is nothing new at all. The left has not just recently commenced in re-writing history and presenting their myths as truths, nor has it just today started condescending to believing Christians:

To many minds conditioned by the Enlightenment, shaped by science and all too aware of the Crusades and corruptions of the church, Christmas is a fairy tale.

This is a familiar refrain. He takes as stare decisis the left's oft-repeated claim that the Crusades were an evil rather than a response to the threat of conquest, and in the same sentence asserts that Enlightenment thinkers must necessarily take his own [leftist] view. Oddly I never got any of that out of Hume [my favorite] nor Smith, nor Locke, nor Hobbes. To believe that an oft-repeated claim is the truth is not "Enlightenment" thinking at all, rather it is something much more common to the 20th century [and not at all admirable].

On one point I have to disagree with Dr. Mohler:

Newsweek should be embarrassed by this one-sided article presented as a serious investigation of the Christmas story. The magazine's editor may brag about Meacham's extensive study as a college student, but there can be no justification for the lack of balance and the absence of credible conservative scholarship in this article. This is not a serious and balanced consideration of the Christian truth claim, but a broadside attack packaged as a condescending essay of advice...

Perhaps [well almost certainly] Dr. Mohler is a more forgiving man than I. I long ago lost the ability to say that some secular-leftist person or institution ought to be ashamed. I have been convinced, for rather a long time now, that they have no sense of shame in writing or speaking in self-congratulatory screeds and in refusing to even acknowledge the possibility of a rational disagreement with their socio-political worldview. Whether they ought to be seems almost a whimsical point anymore. Otherwise right on, Dr. Mohler!

Is the Newsweek article the religion reporting equivalent of Rathergate?

Not really no. Perhaps if Meacham had presented a fabricated "lost book" of the Bible and made his argument on the basis of the words therein it might be. Meacham's piece is more analogous to the discovery of penumbrae in the Constitution in which heretofore unknown rights are claimed to exist.

What accounts for the appearance in a major news magazine of such a biased piece?

It is reflective of the culture which dominates the news-show-biz and has done so for the quarter-century during which I have bothered to notice. This culture hasn't any comprehension of believing Christians nor of observant Jews and it doesn't want to have any*. It long ago threw out the truth about such people in favor of a set of stereotypes which it has promoted and continues to promote. The promoters of that culture have had to do this in order to preserve the beliefs which they actually hold and which the real world has offered us ample evidence are false.

If I use Meacham's piece as my measure, then I would have to conclude that the author is among those who believe that by merely being employed by an institution of the old media that his every thought is a moment of journalistic greatness [call it the Carol Simpson Doctrine if you will], that somehow his own opinions are the essence of both enlightened thought and equitable intellectual inquiry. Thoroughly repulsive? Yes. Anything new? Not by a long shot.

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*It doesn't stop there, all non-leftists are anachronisms in the eyes of the news-show-biz's culture.